Authors: Fiona Brand
Zane’s gaze touched on hers. The knowledge that he had also noted the camera formed a moment of intimacy that sent pleasure humming through her. Despite everything that was wrong between them, in that moment she felt utterly connected to Zane, as if they were a couple.
She also felt protected. Next to Zane’s and Spiros’s tanned, muscular frames, Appleby looked weak and weedy. Lilah would not want to be in Appleby’s shoes if he tried to take photos or file a story.
Like Appleby, John Smith did not look anything like the
GQ
photograph he had supplied. With his plump build, balding head and glasses, he didn’t come close.
A blond head popped out of the cabin, breaking the stilted conversation. Lilah recognized the pretty flight attendant from the jet. Though she was dressed now in a bright pink bikini teamed with a pair of low-slung white shorts, evidently Jasmine was fulfil ing the same role, because she had a tray of cold drinks.
Lilah noticed that Jack Riordan seemed riveted by Jasmine’s honey-blond hair and mental y crossed him off her now-defunct list.
After casting off, Spiros took the wheel. To Lilah’s relief, Zane didn’t leave her alone with the three men, but stayed glued to her side. Her relief was short-lived as Zane systematical y questioned each of the three J’s about their lives, concentrating on their finances.
An hour into an agonizingly slow trip, which bore more of a resemblance to the Spanish Inquisition than a pleasure cruise, they reached Ambrus.
Zane dropped anchor. Spiros heaved the inflatable raft into the water, preparatory to rowing to the beach. The three J’s trooped below to change into their beachwear.
Lilah clamped down on her frustration and helped Jasmine take glasses and bottles to the gal ey. When she emerged on deck, Zane was securing the inflatable. She checked that the three J’s were stil below. “You had no right to interrogate them like that.”
Apart from the fact that it had been embarrassing, it had utterly nixed any opportunities to make Zane jealous. She had barely been able to get a word in edgewise.
Zane knotted the rope to a cleat and straightened. “Did you real y believe Appleby owned his own software company?”
When he had not seemed to know the difference between a megabyte and a gigabyte, it hadn’t seemed likely. “No.”
“Or that John Smith is the CEO of an accounting firm?”
She had not caught on to al of the jargon Zane, who had a double degree in business administration and accounting, had dropped into the conversation, but she had understood enough to know that John Smith had failed the test. “Jack Riordan seems genuine.” His knowledge of the yacht at least seemed to back up his smal boat-building business.
At that moment, the three men emerged on deck, ready to board the inflatable. Appleby and Smith, their alabaster skin slathered with sunblock, appeared to glow beneath the brassy Mediterranean sun.
If Lilah had been fooled, even for a second, that Zane was doing this out of the kindness of his heart, that notion would have now been completely discredited.
First the inquisition, now the swimsuit contest.
When they reached the beach, Jasmine tossed her shorts on the sand, laid out a bright yel ow towel and lay down to sunbathe. While Zane and Spiros assembled snorkeling gear, Lilah strol ed behind a clump of shade trees to change. Setting her beach bag down on the sand, she extracted the hot orange bikini, which she had been reluctant to change into on the yacht.
Before her courage deserted her altogether, she quickly changed then knotted the turquoise sarong that went with the bikini around her hips. She frowned at the lush display of tanned cleavage and considered changing back into her white jeans, camisole and shirt.
Even as the thought passed through her mind she knew she could not afford to do that now. She had lost the leverage of the three J’s and she was almost out of time.
Unfortunately, the bikini was now a crucial part of her strategy.
Zane almost had a heart attack when Lilah emerged onto the beach. He was glad Spiros had taken the three J’s on a snorkeling expedition. It was an easier solution than the medieval threats he would have been forced to issue just in case any one of them decided it was okay to look.
The cut of the outrageously sexy bikini somehow managed to make Lilah’s narrow hips and delicate curves look mouthwateringly voluptuous. Added to that, after just a few days on Medinos, her skin had taken on a tawny glow that made her green eyes look startlingly light, her cheekbones even more exotic. In the span of a few minutes, Lilah had gone from mysterious and reserved to lusciously, searingly hot.
If she had bought the bikini for the specific purpose of driving him crazy, Zane thought grimly, she had achieved the result. “When did you get the bikini?”
Lilah, who seemed more interested in laying out a bright turquoise towel and rummaging through her trendily matching beach bag, gave him a distracted, too innocent look as if she hadn’t quite registered who had spoken.
Zane’s jaw clamped tighter as she abandoned arranging a neat line of possessions, one of which, suspiciously, was a
red
folder, and final y seemed to become aware of his presence.
She directed a smile in his general direction. “Two days ago.”
After their discussion.
Zane folded his arms across his chest so that he wouldn’t repeat the cavemanlike behavior he had displayed on the jetty and simply grab Lilah. He eyed the red folder and wondered what new scheme she was cooking up now.
“Have you come to a decision yet?”
She lifted a hand to her eyes and stared out to sea as if she was more interested in the four heads bobbing in the water than having an actual conversation with him. “I’m stil thinking it over.”
His jaw clamped. If he wasn’t mistaken the smile she had given him was the same smooth, professional smile she had given the builder earlier on in the day. “The way I see it, we have three days left.” He jerked his head in the direction of the swimmers. “And we’re wasting time.”
Lilah’s cheeks went instantly pink. “Is sex al you’re interested in?”
He noted with satisfaction, any suggestion that she was disinterested in him evaporated. “At the moment, yes.”
Lilah glanced around distractedly. Her gaze came to rest on Jasmine, who was flipping through a magazine.
Zane frowned. It was not the response he had wanted.
Living with Lilah for the past two days had been like living with a professional y cheerful automaton. The passionate nights aside, he was now official y frustrated. “Jasmine can’t hear a thing. She’s listening to her iPod. If she registered anything short of an explosion it would be a miracle.”
She glared at him and he realized something else that was different about Lilah. She’d had light streaks put in her hair.
His hold on his temper slipped another notch. He had never thought of himself as a control ing person; his motto was Live and Let Live. However, when it came to Lilah he didn’t feel anything that came even remotely close to flexibility. He found himself supremely irked that she had changed her hair without even bothering to mention it to him. “You’ve changed your hair.”
From her beach bag Lilah fished out another object, which seemed much more rivetingly interesting than the conversation he was trying to have with her. “Yesterday. I didn’t think you had noticed.”
The bright turquoise iPod, which signaled that Lilah had found a new way to block him out, was the last straw, literal y. In two years Lilah had never been trendy; she had remained tantalizingly, cool y the same. “Honey, I’m noticing now.”
Lilah’s gaze flashed to his, the deep anger in their depths electrifying, and suddenly the air was charged.
For two years he had been burningly aware of Lilah’s underlying sensuality, the latent feminine power buried beneath the tempting reserve and bland, virginal white.
The reserve, like the white clothing, was long gone, replaced by hot, passionate colors, cutting-edge fashion and way too much skin.
He had been so absorbed with his own reactions to the new confident, sexy Lilah that he hadn’t stopped to think about what was driving the change.
The answer was terrifyingly simple. Lilah was no longer a virgin. Thanks to him, she was now a mature woman of experience. Single. Available. And, if he wasn’t mistaken, ready to shop around for what she wanted.
Taking into consideration the wish list in her white
folder, he had to assume that the kind of man she would
want to extend her sexual experience with would not be a
man with a dysfunctional past and an inability to commit.
He did not think she was calculatingly aware of the power she could wield. She was stil feeling her way, but he was grimly certain that it would not take her long to find out.
It was a dangerous state of affairs.
Suddenly the color of the new folder—red—took on an unsettling meaning. The thought that if he could not satisfy Lilah’s needs that she could start experimenting with men—
plural—made him go cold inside.
Jack Riordan popped out of the surf, a speargun in one hand, a silvery fish flapping on the end.
Feeling embattled, Zane studied Riordan with new eyes.
He was the least good-looking of the three, but he had a lean, rugged build and the kind of mature dependability that even Zane liked.
Riordan had one other advantage; he was a mature man who was clearly looking to settle down.
It was an advantage he should have taken more note of before he had risked bringing Riordan to Medinos.
His jaw tightened. This wasn’t working.
His aim had been to protect Lilah and eliminate the competition. Unfortunately, Lilah seemed to
like
Riordan, in which case his plan could have backfired.
The thought that she might start dating Riordan was a defining moment.
Over my dead body
.
Flashes of white caught his eye; Smith and Appleby were also exiting the water. He scooped up the beach bag, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, contained Lilah’s clothes. He had played a waiting game long enough.
Lilah realized Zane’s intent a bare second before he swung her up into his arms. She noted where the expensive little iPod, which she had been on the verge of working out, had fal en and clutched at his bare shoulders. She tried to repress the automatic thril that he was actual y carrying her.
She was stil angry and deeply depressed at the thought that had occurred to her, that she had made a dreadful mistake in thinking that Zane cared for her. That her entire strategy was flawed.
If Zane was even the tiniest bit as obsessed as she had become, he should have noticed her hair before now.
She stared at the approaching tree line. “Where are you taking me?”
“Somewhere you can get dressed.”
“I’m
wearing
clothes.”
His gaze burned over the expanse of silky skin bared by the skimpy bikini, the length of her legs visible beneath the transparent gauze of the sarong. “Couldn’t prove it by me.”
“I’m wearing more than Jasmine.” In point of fact she was wearing a great deal more. Jasmine had a microscopic bikini, with no sarong.
“What Jasmine does or does not wear is irrelevant.”
Cool shade slid over her skin as he rounded the clump of trees she had changed behind earlier. Lilah blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. “I don’t see why.”
He set her down. “Because Jasmine doesn’t interest me.
Which brings me to the subject of Smith, Appleby and Riordan. Get rid of them.”
There was a moment of vibrating silence.
Zane was jealous
.
Lilah kept her expression careful y blank, but a part of her was melting and ridiculously happy because even if Zane wasn’t showing any signs of being in love with her yet, he wanted her enough to bul y and coerce and demand.
And he wanted the three J’s out of the picture.
“I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”
His gaze was hot and distinctly irritable, signaling that the cool reserve that had grown between them when she had refused to agree to his relationship terms was final y and definitely gone. “Take as much time as you need. But
we
have an agreement and we are not wasting any more time.”
Both hands were wrapped around the soft flesh of her upper arms now. With a slow, inevitable movement, he pul ed her close. His mouth brushed hers, heat zapped through her.
Drawing in a deep breath, she planted her palms on his chest, created a smal amount of overheated space and tried not to notice how gorgeous his chest looked. “I’ve decided to finish with the three J’s.”
There was a moment of tense silence. “Wil you stay with me at the castel o tonight?”
For a shivering, delicious second she drowned in the stormy depths of Zane’s eyes. Of course, she would be present at the launch party at the castel o, but Zane was asking her to stay with him at his family home. “Yes.”
* * *
He was acutely conscious that the guest suite he had al ocated Lilah, the only one next to his, also happened to be next door to Lucas’s suite.
Zane unlocked the door and handed her the key.
Lilah glanced at Lucas’s door, a faint flush to her cheeks.
Zane’s jaw tightened as he pushed the door open and stepped inside. He had been on the verge of asking Lilah to stay with him in his private suite a number of times that afternoon, but every time he approached the subject his jaw had locked and the words wouldn’t come.
He carried her suitcase through to the bedroom.
Lilah unzipped her case. “What time do you need me downstairs?”
Zane checked his watch. Frustrated, he noted he was overdue at a press interview.
He had spent valuable time driving Appleby, Riordan and Smith to the airport and making sure they boarded their commercial flight out. In light of the discovery that Appleby had been a journalist, and that he had somehow gotten photos of Lilah in her bikini, wiping the memory stick of his camera had been a job he had not wanted to entrust to Spiros. “In one hour.”